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"Moreover, you scorned our people, and compared the Albanese to sheep, and according to your custom think of us with insults. Nor have you shown yourself to have any knowledge of my race. Our elders were Epirotes, where this Pirro came from, whose force could scarcely support the Romans. This Pirro, who Taranto and many other places of Italy held back with armies. I do not have to speak for the Epiroti. They are very much stronger men than your Tarantini, a species of wet men who are born only to fish. If you want to say that Albania is part of Macedonia I would concede that a lot more of our ancestors were nobles who went as far as India under Alexander the Great and defeated all those peoples with incredible difficulty. From those men come these who you called sheep. But the nature of things is not changed. Why do your men run away in the faces of sheep?"

Letter from Skanderbeg to the Prince of Taranto ▬ Skanderbeg, October 31 1460

The Chams live in the south-southwestern part of Albania. Their land is called Chameria. It borders to the north and northwest on the territory of the Labs, to the east on the district of Janina, the south on the district of Arta, and to the west on the sea. In this region there is an enclave called Suli, inhabited by Suliots who are all Christians, but not Greeks. They are Albanians in language, customs and origin. They have a reputation for bravery and misfortune. The Cham tribe is made up of very zealous Muslims of the Sunni sect, and a dervish would risk his life in Chameria. The men here are savage, extremely fanatic, and interested only in their independence and freedom. They are energetic in character, but tend to anarchy and this is what they understand by freedom. With great patience, they put up with the yoke of Ali Pasha who treated them with more consideration than he did the Tosks and Labs. Their tribe provides many ulema (Muslim priests and legal experts). The Chams are generally tall, and have mostly black hair. […]

"Why were not the Arvanites assimilated like other multilingual speaking groups in Greece, and why has the Arvanitic language survived in some parts of Greece until today? Most of the towns that still speak Arvanitic are located in the Argolis region
of the Peloponnese. Older generations of people (between the ages of 60–100+) from these towns continue to speak Arvanitic as well as Greek. Many of the younger generations have working knowledge of the language. The towns of Prosymni and Limnes seem to have the greatest number of speakers today. The towns neighbor one another,
but are still about 4 kilometers apart. Limnes is on higher elevation at about 520 meters above sea level where Prosymni is closer to lower ground. The nearest metropolitan cities are Argos and Nafplion. But the locals in Limnes still prefer to go into Corinth instead of Argos or Nafplion. Today modern roads have made it easier to access the towns, but for some time both Prosymni and Limnes had been mostly isolated. Several other towns in the area such as, Manesi, Dendra, Mykines, Inachos,Ira, Monastiraki, Neo Iraio, at one time are also thought to have also spoken Arvanitic at one time.There is no question however, that Arvanitic is dying and will likely disappear with the next generation. The locals in the towns in Prosymni and Limnes likely learned Greek when systems of communications and commerce were extended to the neighboring commercial towns of Argos and Nafplion. Greek had historically been the language of trade in the region. We know that the residents had schools of some form or another from Ottoman times onward, and that some years after Greek independence a national Greek school had appeared in the region. Arvanite was partly preserved because the Arvanitic speaking communities in the area were not in the area of expansion sought by the Greek state for most of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (they had become part of the Greek kingdom after the Revolution).

The Megali Idea or Greece’s nineteenth century policy to reclaim lands that were thought to be Greek (and usually at the expense of other nation), looked to recreate ancient and Byzantine Greece based along geographic and cultural lines. Thessaly was incorporated in 1881, most of Macedonia and Epirus in 1913, and Western Thrace in 1919. Non-Greek speakers from these areas felt the most pressure to drop their local languages and adopt Greek. Moreover, the Greek state diverted thier educational resources in these areas. Schools were opened to teach Greek and locals eventually dropped their native tongues.This type of pressure never occurred in most of the Arvanitic speaking towns in the Peloponnese, since they were already part of the Greek state. It was also essentially the women; the mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers who helped
preserve the language in these towns. The language was learned by children in informal learning settings, in a space and around people that they were most comfortable around. It was a language that community members associated with their past, and with those that cared and nurtured them. "(THEODORE G. ZERVAS, 2014)